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Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! is the first exhibition globally to explore South Africa’s history of photobook publishing. Initiated in 2020, this project describes the emergence of a cosmopolitan photobook culture in South Africa through the presentation of a large and contradictory archive of publications made between 1945 and 2025.

As the variant spelling of the exhibition’s title implies, clarity and meaning around this area of bookmaking are still fluid. Alongside classical examples of photobooks, the exhibition presents artists’ books, literary experiments, coffee-table books, activist pamphlets and various examples of state and corporate propaganda. Almost all the books on display are browsable.

This gesture is central to the exhibition. Books are not decorative objects, they are meant to be touched, their ideas engaged. In 2022, when Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! was presented at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town, the books were chronologically displayed on a ledge that ran along the perimeter of the gallery. The timeline is a tested conceptual device that offers a useful means to tell a complicated story.

The books here on the second floor of Kyoto’s Hachiku-an (former Kawasaki residence) are also chronologically displayed in a timeline, albeit across three tables. This timeline presents evidence of the beginnings of a cosmopolitan book culture during the politically charged years of high apartheid years (1948–94), when state repression and censorship ensnared even photobooks. It also includes abundant examples of innovation in photography and book design in the democratic years that followed (1994–present).

Additionally, there is a curated display of important and outstanding photobooks from the last four decades.

Text by Sean O’Toole